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Guidance on color correction
I shot a video interview with a friend on a partly overcast day. Here’s a snap from the footage:
https://paulkon.com/pics/outdoor-lighting.jpg
As you can see, we look really pale! I’m brand new to color correction–have gone over several tutorial on the net, so I can do the mechanics of the various tools. But I don’t actually know what to do with them. I’ve messed around with the settings for color correction, levels, etc. but can’t confidently say it’s a lot better than what I started with.
From looking at this picture, which Sony Vegas tools (I have platinum 9) would you use, and what would you specifically do with them?
thanks,
Paul.
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8 Replies
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I’m not sure what tools are available in Platinum 9. I have Pro 9. However, I suspect that Vegas is not well suited to color correct this photo.
It looks to me like most of the colors in the photo, the deck and vegetation for example, are reasonably correct. The problem looks like a loss of flesh tone caused by overexposure. If that is correct, then any correction will be limited to just a few areas of the photo. That means the use of masks plus various color correction tools. That starts getting to be a very complicated undertaking.
I suggest doing the correction in a photo program such as Photoshop where masks and adjustment layers would be easier to apply. One note however. Some of the skin looks pure white to me. Those areas will need more than adjustment layers to fix.
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I’m no Artisté (and Mr. Peterson is definitely right that blown out is blown out), but here’s what I got with a few minutes of fooling around. Probably a tad too much and we’re getting into the Realm of the Fake Tan, but at least you can see what’s going on:
Broadly, I used Secondary Color Correction (3x) to hit various skin tones (one for the blown out areas, one for “normal” skin tones and then another to pick up some missed pixels). Fortunately, the overexposed areas are all skin (except a couple of flowers) and there aren’t any fluffy clouds or anything else pure white that’ll look odd with skin tones, so this could have been worse! I did often get a bit of the wooden rail at the same time, but it looks fine with a little “skin” color correction, too.
– Pulled the gamma down
– pushed the color up a bit (maybe 10-15%) in the skin tone range (towards 11 o’clock on the color wheel, halfway between yellow and red, more or less – toggle your Vectorscope on and it’s obvious)
– pulled the gamma down on the whole image a tad (not more than 85-80%) using the regular three way color corrector.That’s all, just a technical start really. May or may not work in full motion.
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“Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don’t have film.”
– Steven Wright
https://videopia.org -
‘Broadly, I used Secondary Color Correction (3x) to hit various skin tones (one for the blown out areas, one for “normal” skin tones and then another to pick up some missed pixels)’
For as far as I know, the secondary color correction is not available in the Vegas Movie Studio (Platinum). So I tried a different way and got nearly the same result as you: just duplicated the track, applied the multiply mode (which I think is present in Vegas Movie Studio Platinum and increased gamma in the upper track.
Theo
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‘I suggest doing the correction in a photo program such as Photoshop where masks and adjustment layers would be easier to apply.’
Ofcourse photoshop is a superior program. And since version CS3 is has the ability to work with video. This has even been improved in CS4. However, is it not a lot of work to adjust this interview frame by frame in photoshop. Or do you use special ACTIONS to do this job for you?
Theo
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Thanks all for your great suggestions. I tried Theo’s approach and it worked well. For any other beginners out there, he’s exactly what I did.
1. Duplicated the video track. At first I couldn’t because I had the max of 4 video tracks already (for no good reason). I just deleted one of these and then Duplicate Track became active.
2. I put the duplicate track in layer 2, with the original in layer 1.
3. On the original track, I clicked the flim strip thing for “compositing mode” and chose Multiply (Mask).
4. From the Video FX track I dragged in the “levels” and the “color corrector.”
5. On “levels” I put the Gamma up to 2.1.
6. On “color corrector” I put the gamma up to 2. I also put the saturation up to 1.5.
The result looks pretty much like what Theo generated. Thanks again everyone for your help–the output looks much better now.
Paul.
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Good luck with your project!
Theo
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Nicely done, Theo, that’s a great technique. And thanks for the followup, Paul: very clear.
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‘that’s a great technique’
I don’t know if other people use this technique in video editing, but it’s often used in photoshop. Many trics from photoshop can be applied in Vegas.
Theo
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